Case Studies

Within the context of financial sustainability and skills shortages across the sector, councils are facing challenges regarding the attraction and retention of the skilled workforce and leaders they need. As the expectations and role of councils evolves, it is therefore more important than ever to develop and support existing leaders across the sector and ensure they are equipped to be agile, innovative thinkers and capable of overseeing a broad portfolio of services. The Mornington Peninsula has a population of 170,000 that is rapidly growing. We've got 10 per cent of Victoria's coastline, both ocean side and on the bay and we're 70 per cent Green Wedge, despite being a metropolitan area in classification. The Shire has successfully cut costs and made efficiencies within the rate capping environment, but all councils face significant challenges, such as rising community expectations about what council can deliver across a broad range of issues including housing, climate change and associated emergencies, with increasingly lower and lower sources of revenue. The main challenge for the sector is cost shifting. The Shire produced a report in 2024 which highlights the cumulative impact of state and federal government cost shifting for the Shire, with projected costs rising from $38 million to $234 million by 2028. These figures do not include the negative compounded impact of the previous years of rate capping by the Victorian Government. This, combined with rate capping, threatens the council’s financial viability. Trends in the attraction and retention of a skilled workforce have been impacted by localised financial sustainability issues including: -Councils are an important employment source, particularly in small, regional and rural communities. MPSC is one of the largest employers in the region and impacts on competitiveness and outsourced operations impact on the security of the local employment economy; -Impact of rate capping on talent attraction & retention is a challenge, especially when compared with State Government that can often pay at a higher rate than councils; -Impact of rate capping at the time that it was implemented to MPSC which was already a low rating council, has meant that austerity measures in Enterprise Agreement rates were required earlier, resulting in competitiveness issues in salary benchmarking even with other local councils.

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Early in my leadership journey, I had just moved from a Team Leader to a Coordinator role where I had very little experience outside of my area of responsibility in Parks and Sportsfields. My Director recommended me to gain some further experiences outside of our organisation for 12 weeks as Manager of Operations with the Central Goldfields Shire Council. Something outside of my skillset and experience with Property, Street Cleaning and Roads maintenance portfolio. My director ensured me that I had the ability to complete the role and reiterated the opportunity to learn and expand my leadership skills. Challenges of the secondment The key challenges were getting to know the Team, understanding the portfolio and how they managed their works. Some of the Team were excited to have me and were open to sharing information, new ideas and change.  However, some staff only sharing parts of information which resulted in difficulties to assist in completing their work. The role was only for 12 weeks, and to make an impact, it requires longer time. I had to focus on certain limited area to achieve the outcomes. Learnings The ability to use past experiences and transferable skills. Not being a subject matter expert, I relied on the processes to break down issue  to working through the steps to solve the issue. Sometimes as leaders we know the answer and provide this to the staff. This does not allow them to gain skills in problem solving. Little subject matter knowledge, had required me to find a lot of information to understand what and how they do their work. This process has helped the staff to think about their work processes and revisit the steps taken to complete a project. As a team we were able to find improvements in the way we did our work and utilise each other's strengths. Why I went back to complete another one? With the experience that I gained from this, the opportunity to do this again at a growth Council in Whittlesea was an amazing opportunity that would provide different learning experiences. Going to Whittlesea to learn how they contract their work which gave me different approaches to complete our work

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